Endgame off the Board
by Elliptic Eye
Summary: This is the worst afterlife I've ever been to."


Ianto awoke in somebody's lap, and the first thing he saw was down a pink shirt.

Or up a pink shirt. That would explain a lot about the… angle. And the hanging. Objectively speaking, it wasn't a bad angle. Ianto blinked. Still looking up a girl's eighties pink caftan, then.

"Hi. Er, welcome to Thoros Beta, I guess."

It was an American accent, all right, but not the one he wanted to hear.

Ianto sat up quickly and scrabbled backwards on his bum, sharp rocks digging into the heels of his hands. A sound behind him made him whip around, and he saw—ocean. Pink ocean. It still smelled of salt, on the slight breeze that rolled off the water, but it was a light, powdery pink that no terrestrial ocean could ever be if you bled the entire human race into it. The light was ultraviolet in a way that made him feel as if cancer might be spreading under his skin, yet not particularly warm. Still staring, Ianto turned back to the girl who'd been holding him.

She smiled, more than a little uncertainly. She was sitting on the bleached rocks as if she might always have sat there: pretty girl, with wavy, dark hair and dark eyes that looked black in the weird light.

Ianto wet his lips and looked around himself again, buying time. When he failed to come up with any ideas as to what he was buying time for, he finally spoke. "How did I get here?"

"I don't know. You just… washed up."

Ianto nodded, because that was better than a hysterical giggle, and glanced up at the cliffs behind her. Like Dover, only sharp and alien and impossible. And the accents were worse.

"I'm Peri," the girl offered.

"Ianto," he said automatically. "Ianto Jones."

Peri got up and picked her way over to him to offer him a hand up. He stared at it stupidly for a moment and then looked up at her. "Where's Jack?" he asked.

"Who's Jack?"

Somehow, that was precisely the answer he'd been dreading.

* * *

"I'm not exactly sure where this is," Peri told him as they walked down the beach. Some beach. The rocks looked sharp as needles, in places. "Actually, I'm not exactly sure when this is, and that's a bigger deal. I don't know how to get off, anyway, though."

Ianto glanced at her sideways. Looking at Peri was unsettling; she looked young, his age maybe, but there was a tightness around her eyes and silver in her hair that he couldn't quite see, like he just caught flashes of it between cracks in the picture. "How did _you_ get here, then?"

Peri turned to look at him, and he could have sworn he saw fear in her eyes for a moment. "Well… it's a long story."

"You mean you don't know."

She stopped and faced him. "I do know!"

"Really? Because I've got a guess, myself."

Peri put her hands on her hips and stuck her chin out and looked _ridiculous._ "Like you know anything! I got here the normal way. I mean sort of the normal way. I didn't swim up in the ocean, at least."

Ianto snorted. "Peri, we're _dead_. Can't you see that? This is the afterlife. The afterlife is some kind of psychedelic Brighton. There's no Tosh, no Owen, no Lisa, no pterodactyl; Jack isn't here, but then he wouldn't be; my shirt is ruined, I don't have an iron, and everything's pink. Owen was right, being dead really is shit."

Peri just looked at him funnily. "What are you talking about?"

"Why am I even talking to you? You're probably not even real."

That same fear flashed through her eyes. "I'm as real as you are."

"Right. Comforting."

Peri fiddled with the sleeve of her caftan and chewed her lip. "Do you remember anything? Before this place, I mean?"

"Yeah, I remember _dying."_

"Well, aren't you cheerful."

Ianto started to respond, but then he remembered that she probably wasn't real (that couldn't be a real American accent), stuck his hands in his pockets, and kept going down the beach, ignoring her. He heard her sigh dramatically behind him.

Then he heard something else.

"PERPUGILLIAM!"

Ianto spun. At the edge of one of the cliffs towered a figure, and behind the figure towered what looked to Ianto's unpracticed eye like a horde. The man at their head looked like an enormous paper cutout against the sky. His clothing or armor or whatever it was swung out at crazy angles in some unholy marriage of samurai chic and a ship in full sail, and Ianto had never believed that his imagination could do this to him.

Peri threw her head back and shouted up at him. _"Yes, Yrcanos?"_

Ianto jumped. Holy shit, the woman had a pair of lungs.

"OUR ARMY RETURNS TO FEAST TONIGHT, MY QUEEN! WILL YOU JOIN US?"

_"No, thanks! Maybe later!"_

The giant on the cliff shaded his eyes with his hand. "WHO IS THAT?" he bellowed down.

Peri muttered something under her breath that Ianto didn't catch, then bellowed back. _"I don't know, but he's not dangerous!"_

Ianto rounded on Peri. "Is that who it sounds like?" he demanded. Peri and Yrcanos both ignored him.

"WHY DO YOU TARRY WITH HIM?"

_"Excuse me, I'll tarry with whoever I want! We're just having a walk, you know, so get your mind out of the gutter and go sing war songs, or something!"_

"HUMPH!"

_"Humph yourself!"_

"I need to sit down," said Ianto to nobody in particular.

Peri finally looked over at him; far up on the clifftop, Yrcanos and his horde were shoving off. "Are you okay?" she said anxiously.

"This is the worst afterlife I've ever been to."

"Oh, Yrcanos isn't so bad, really. He wouldn't have been my first choice for a husband, but—"

Ianto stared at her incredulously. "You died and married Brian Blessed?"

"Who's Brian Blessed?"

Ianto buried his face in his hands. Everything was pink, and there was Brian Blessed. Oh, God.

After a moment there was a gentle tugging at his sleeve. "Look," said Peri, "do you want to sit down somewhere? I'll tell you whatever I can."

Ianto swallowed and nodded.

A few minutes later, they'd found some rocks that were more comfortable than the others and Peri was sitting with her arms around her knees, biting her lip. Ianto settled himself carefully and tried not to rip his trousers, because it looked like they were the only decent pair he was getting for the rest of eternity.

"I got left here," said Peri. "I still don't know why, exactly, but I don't think he meant to. He wouldn't do that." The words had the sound of a mantra often repeated, and Ianto repressed a shiver. "I don't know a lot about this planet. I can't even remember exactly why we came here, but there were these creatures, the Mentors—they were awful. They were really horrible; they made all the people from Thoros Alpha slaves and when I got here, they were experimenting on Yrcanos. They're not all like that," she added, apparently as an afterthought. "I mean, all the reptile-fish-things. Most of them are okay, it was just the people who were in charge."

Ianto watched her and said nothing. She frowned. "Aren't you going to say you don't believe any of this?"

"I don't think it matters. I'm just disappointed that my imagination is this impoverished."

Peri shrugged, but she looked a little sad at his latest insinuation that she wasn't real. "Anyway. They started to experiment on me, and Yrcanos saved me. He got all the Alphans organized, helped them get rid of the Mentors, and—and we've been here ever since. We only ever found one spaceship, and it accidentally got destroyed in the fighting, so Yrcanos couldn't go back and be king of where he came from. So he stayed to be king here, and—I didn't want to marry him, but the Doctor had gone, and he's been really kind—"

Her voice broke. Ianto slowly raised his head, and he felt something creeping around the heart and stomach he didn't think he had.

"What did you say?"

"I know that doesn't exactly sound like the greatest review, but he takes care of me."

"Not that. The other. What did you say about the Doctor?"

Peri froze. "You know him?"

"You didn't mean _a_ doctor. You meant _the_ Doctor."

Peri looked over her shoulder, as if frightened of someone hearing. "Yes, but do you know him?"

"No." Ianto felt hollow. "No, but I know—" _Shit._ "I knew someone who did."

"It can't be coincidence," said Peri.

"Why are you talking to me?" Ianto demanded, his voice coming out rough. "Why did you find me? On a whole planet, how did you end up finding me?" He grabbed her wrists. "You know something. Tell me!"

"You're different!" She wrenched her arms out of his grip. "You're different from Yrcanos and the others, I don't know how. It's not just that you're dressed like you're from Earth, it's… I don't know what. Maybe it is just your clothes and I'm just homesick."

Ianto passed a hand over the back of his neck. "Sorry I grabbed you," he muttered.

"Good."

Another breeze was picking up, carrying that salt-smell up from the pink water. It was a barely-there smell, almost more like a memory than a sense. In a fit of irrelevance, Ianto wondered if the water had trashed his watch, and he pushed up his cuff only to realize it wasn't there.

"Peri," he said slowly, "how long have you been here?"

There—that fear, again, hidden quickly. "I'm not sure."

"A guess, then."

"I don't know. Long enough to overthrow the Mentors and start a new kingdom; however long that took."

"But days? Tides? Seasons? Is there anything to mark the time?"

"Yes, but…"

Ianto hugged his arms and shut his eyes. He didn't want to be here. He didn't. Oh, _Christ,_ he wanted to be back with Jack, and the strange light was giving him a headache.

"I'm not sure I'm real," Peri whispered.

She looked afraid in a way that only people who had been living with fear for a long time could look. Ianto was glad he couldn't see what he looked like.

"You could come with us," Peri said, and it sounded like she was begging. "With Yrcanos and me. We could all be together, it could be nice."

"Nice, yeah," said Ianto. "Like freeing the oppressed and getting married next to a nice pink sea. Nice."

"It was something to do," said Peri.

Ianto felt sick. "Something to do. Like someone _gave_ you something do to, and you could feel all right doing it. And now we can go cuddle up with Yrcanos your warlord husband that neither of us thinks exists."

"It's better than nothing!"

They stared at each other for a long time.

"Where do you think this is?" Ianto asked. "You think the Doctor has something to do with it."

"I… well, I've had time to think about it. He once told me about a place called the Matrix that his people made. He said every TARDIS was connected to it somehow, and he always said that he was connected to the TARDIS. Did you ever travel in one?"

"No, never." _But I know someone who did._

"This is stupid, really. I mean, if it were some kind of virtual reality, we should just be able to change it with our minds, right?"

Ianto glanced up at her. "Assuming we have them."

Peri grabbed his hand without looking at him. "If it's the Doctor doing it, he probably doesn't mean to. And… it'll probably stop whenever… he does."

Ianto's throat was tight enough that he couldn't have told her the thought that was assembling itself in his mind if he'd wanted to. He knew the Doctor wasn't immortal; Jack had told him so.

Ianto had often wondered what would happen to Jack when the universe finally died. He'd never wondered before whether he would have a chance to find out.


End file.
